


The Records of Wandering Years

by GriffinExtinct



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 22:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5107802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GriffinExtinct/pseuds/GriffinExtinct
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pre-film, just a lot about the wives and their ‘happy’ little castle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Records of Wandering Years

At the top of the stone steps, high up above the pool and cast in silhouette against the window, sat The Splendid Angharad. Barefoot and blinking sleep from her eyes, Capable padded across the main chamber towards her, letting the brightness of the full moon guide her steps. Angharad must have heard Capable, but she didn’t shift, just kept watching the stars.

A step lower than Angharad, Capable sat quietly and listened to the other woman’s slow breathing. There was the pause in her breath as though she were going to speak but when she said nothing, Capable raised her brows just a little, turned her face to her and asked, “what are you thinking?”

“In honesty I’m trying not to think,” was what Angharad said with hardly a pause.

“And is it working?”

An almost smile then. Almost. “No,” she said, and turned her head to look at Capable. “Not even a little.”

Even in this half-light the cuts on Angharad’s face were clear to see - dark and angry and messy. No longer were they bleeding, but it would still be a day or so until they even began to properly scab over.

(When they’d found her that morning - Toast first, Toast calling the alarm - Angharad had been kneeling with the shard of broken pottery clutched in her hand, half of her face a wet mask of red. Through the blood her expression was fierce, her eyes wild, and she’d hissed, “let him find me Splendid now!”

Capable didn’t tell her that she would always be Splendid, didn’t tell her that even if she cut up every centimetre of that face, she’d still be the most beautiful thing Capable knew.)

Capable reached out and took Angharad’s hand and Angharad squeezed it gently. Capable could hear The Dag talking in her sleep, and Cheedo’s quiet snoring, and the slow trickle of the water entering the pool.

“Are you going to sleep tonight?” Capable asked, and Angharad shrugged.

“Maybe. In a while.”

Capable already knew she’d wait with her and so she moved a little closer on the step and resting her head against Angharad. Still with her eyes on the wide, dark sky, Angharad lifted her hand to stroke Capable’s curls.

–

“I don’t care!” Cheedo said, yanking her doll back from Toast. “I love her!”

“You’re too old for dolls, Cheedo,” Toast snapped.

Miss Giddy was the one trying to calm them both down, telling Toast that Cheedo didn’t  _have_ to be too old for dolls, that she was allowed to like what she liked. (So frequently it was Miss Giddy settling arguments between girls, here in this cavern where no one had space or privacy. It was little wonder that they fought so viciously at times; they had no one to love but each other, and that love could so easily be become frustration instead.

While Cheedo and Toast yanked at an old doll, The Dag drew patterns on the chalkboard and, between these patterns, she was forming anagrams for herself and her sisters. Her latest love was anagrams, discovered yesterday from a word puzzle book. ‘The Dag’ hadn’t been good for anything, but 'The Daggiest’ had been a goldmine that showed itself down the right hand side of the board in neat cursive: _Egghead Tits, Gaged Tithes, Tagged Heist, Gate Sighted, Hi! Gag Tested, That Side Egg_. Capable liked that she had become  _Pacable_ , easily pacified. She felt like that a lot, watching but never acting. It was hard to feel anything else in here.

She was sitting on the water’s edge beside Splendid Angharad ( _Hidden Asp Garland_ ) and (sort of) reading an ancient history book about imperialism. In some ways she found familiar ideas to the Citadel but in most ways it was all too much to take in; the size of nations past, the sheer number of people - these were things Capable found incredible and terrifying to consider, especially when she could be the one to look back and know what they didn’t know.  _You poor bastards_ , she thought, flipping the page.  _You don’t even know what’s going to hit you._

There were only three history books in their collection, and Capable had read them all by now. Besides, she wasn’t really reading this one so much as she was waiting for Angharad to finish her chapter and pass the book over. The two of them were reading the same old paperback copy of Banjo Paterson poetry, passing it back and forth between each other.

It was Miss Giddy who’d sat the girls down a few weeks ago and read  _The Man from Snowy River_  out loud to them - once through without pause and then another time explaining it all. There had been some confusion and argument between the girls over what a horse was actually like, but The Dag had sought to clear it up, telling them a horse was 'kith and kin to a dog’. But that was like Dag to compare all animals to dogs. She always had stories about them to share, even claiming she’d had a dog of her own they’d trained up and made nice before she’d come into the Citadel. Angharad believed her. Capable didn’t.

(Miss Giddy had stories about dogs too. She said that once upon a time they hadn’t all been mongrels, that people had kept funny little fluffy dogs and made them look dainty and pretty, had kept them inside their homes and let them sleep in their beds. But that was a long time back, way back before so many of them had mixed with the dingoes, before dogs had become wild packs roaming across the desert in search of meat. )

Her book boring, Capable leaned over to read the page Angharad held open. The brunette drew it away with a smile and said, “wait your turn!”

“But I’m bored,” Capable said, giving Angharad her best pout. Angharad didn’t laugh but that smile didn’t disappear and so Capable kissed her shoulder.

“King Sis,” said The Dag suddenly, crouched on the other side of the stone pond and tilting her head to look at them both. “Kissing makes for a shonky anagram.”

Angharad - cut face, cut arms, but still ever Splendid Angharad - asked, “what about 'love’?”

“Nah,” The Dag said with a quick shake of her head. “You can’t make anything at all out of love.”

Angharad passed the book across to Capable with a sigh and said, “well,  _that’s_ depressing.”

Angharad lay back on the stone, feet in the water, and Capable looked at the Dag and said, “How 'bout 'sisters’?”

The Dag ran her fingers through the water, thinking about it. After a pause she came up with, “resists.”

There was a quiet moment then when Capable felt like they were all thinking the same thing. Resists. What was ever the use in resisting?

“I stress!” Cheedo suddenly cried and all the girls turned to look at her. “Sisters,” she explained. “I stress.”

Toast made a small snort and raised an eyebrow. “Sounds about right.” She and Capable shared a secret smile.

From her seat in the corner, where she was sewing a sleeve back onto her own dress, Miss Giddy said, “I have one for love.” She smiled at them. “It’s 'vole’”

“Vole?” Toast asked, scrunching up her nose. “And what the f-”

Miss Giddy raised a finger. “If you’d give me just one second, Little Miss Knowing, then I’ll add that to your knowledge as well. A vole,” she began, in the tone that always made them pay attention, “was a small burrowing animal like a mouse. You hardly ever saw them, instead you just saw what they did. It could destroy whole ecosystems and leave them ravaged, but it could also provide important nutrients that helped things come to life and grow. Voles,” Miss Giddy concluded with a sure nod. “Just like love.”

Capable sort of wanted to tell Miss Giddy she was reaching, but she also liked the idea of small rodent love burrowing down deep inside. Sometimes when Angharad looked at her, Capable really did feel like there was something moving inside of her, shivering away down low in her belly.  

–

Some nights they all slept in each other’s beds. Some nights they couldn’t stand to be that close to anyone.

Some nights one of them cried, but when the sun rose no one mentioned it.

Tonight no one was crying, but the wind outside was howling its best and the lightning that flashed in from the main chamber cast jagged shadows on the bedroom walls. Capable had her cheek laid on Angharad’s chest, neither of them asleep.

(Angharad could never sleep through storms. She’d told Capable that it wasn’t that she was  _scared_ of storms, just that they were unpredictable and she remembered too well what it had been like out in the Wasteland, searching for shelter from the sand and wind. Capable remembered also that she’d said something cheesy to Angharad then, something like 'your eyes are like a beautiful storm’ and the quiet moment between them had turned into giggles.)

A crack of distant thunder, somewhere out across the Never Never, and Angharad’s hand resting on Capable’s shoulder tightened just enough that the redhead could feel the change.

“Do you still think about your sister?” Angharad asked, her voice a whisper so close to Capable’s forehead.

Capable closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, and said, “Of course.”

She thought Angharad was going to say something else to follow that, but it was only silence resting in the small space between them. And so Capable lifted her head just enough to kiss her. When Capable and Angharad kissed it was always soft and without force, the both of them seeking gentleness in the other when they couldn’t find it outside of themselves. There was so much hardness in this world, and Angharad was Capable’s home, the only true place of safety and relief.

The first day they’d met, Capable had been an angry thing. She’d been carried in around the waist by Rictus, and she’d squirmed and swore and kicked, twisting in his arms to spit in his face. Picked out of a crowd by Immortan Joe and stolen from her family, Capable didn’t know how to be soft. Her first words to Angharad had been “piss off!” with a hand flung out to keep the other girl away.

She didn’t want to be sisters.

She didn’t want to be friends.

She wanted only to go back down and find her mother and sister among the people she knew.

On her fifth night of captivity, when Capable’s anger had turned instead to a hollowing sadness, Angharad came to sit beside her. “Fever killed my parents,” was what she said. “I don’t remember them very well. And I don’t really remember my brothers who got took to be War Boys either. I think they’re probably dead now too.” She looked over to the other two girls in their prison, one as pale as the moon and the other dark as engine oil - The Dag and Threnody of the East. Angharad smiled at Capable, just a little. “Don’t forget your family, but don’t let it stop you making a new one wherever you can.”

Capable hadn’t wanted to be friends with Angharad or with Dag or with Threnody. Only after Threnody grew sick and was cast out did Capable realise how much they had all come to mean to her, despite her best efforts.

Immortan Joe taught her anger, but The Splendid Angharad retaught her kindness.

—-

Angharad’s cuts were scabbing over, deep brown-red. It was the same colour as the mud paint that the Dag had made and was painting in long stripes down Cheedo’s face. “Behold,” she said, long fingers slowly wiggling in the air, dripping just a little. “Now you’re a beauty without equal.”

Cheedo made a face (amused, unsure, delighting in The Dag’s attention) and then went to check herself out in the mirror. The Dag turned to look at Capable and asked, “your turn,” she said, an almost accusatory finger pointed her way.

“No way,” she told her.

“Don’t you want to join this congregation of amazons?”

Capable shared a look with Toast, sitting at the piano, before saying, “What I want is not being covered in dirt and mess.”

“What a sook,” The Dag, but already she’d lost true interest in the game it seemed, leaning over to wash her hands clean.

“What a dag,” Toast countered, before turning back to the piano and dancing her fingers along the lowest keys.

Cheedo returned from the mirror and said, with a spin, “well,  _I_  like it!”

“You look very striking,” Angharad agreed.

Cheedo looked embarrassed but pleased. Under Angharad’s attentions, Cheedo was flourishing. She had been silent when she’d first arrived. (No, she hadn’t been silent, Capable amended. Cheedo had hardly been able to stop crying from the moment she got there.) But Angharad was so good at bringing them all out, so good at opening her heart even when everything was dark. Angharad cried and cried and raged but Angharad was always the one who promised that it would be okay, they at least they were all together.

Alone would be harder; they each of them knew that.

And so now Cheedo talked. Cheedo even laughed and sang and danced and Capable was so scared for her, for what was to come, for what she would have to go through. Capable couldn’t stop that happening. Not even Angharad could stop that, with whatever small influence she might have over Immortan Joe.

Infinitesimally small, but still sometimes Capable saw it. If Joe was able to love any of them at all, then it was Angharad, his Splendid, his Treasure.

(Angharad wasn’t Capable’s Treasure. Capable didn’t want to own her, didn’t want to keep her. Capable had dreams of the two of them out there in the Wasteland together, and in them it was arduous and unholy, but it was them alone and together. No one touched them.)

Capable sang as well. Her voice was thin and often caught on high notes, but any time she sang Angharad would kiss her and smile, and Capable would feel happy just to have Angharad’s arms wrapped around her, their bodies close.

From where she lay now on the floor, The Dag suddenly pointed up and out the window. “Shooting star.”

“It’s day,” Capable reminded her

The Dag rolled over and grinned at Capable as though they’d just shared their own little joke. “Miss Giddy said that in two years there’ll come a comet so bright and beautiful it will light up the night sky like a colossal headlight.”

“Really?” Angharad asked, moving to lie down on the floor and watch out the window is well. “That’ll be something to see at least.”

Cheedo lay down next to Angharad, drawing close, taking Angharad’s hand. Capable and Toast were the last to join them all, each of the girls finding a place on the stone floor where they could watch the bright clouds drift by high above.

There was quiet for a while, each of them with their own thoughts. It was Toast who spoke first, her tone unreadable. “Two years is a really long time.”

“No,” said Angharad, and Capable tilted her head to watch her unscarred profile. “It’s hardly anything at all.”


End file.
